Public Programs

Please join us at 6:30 p.m. Sept. 3 for a presentation by Lutz Koepnick, the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of German, Cinema and Media Arts at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, in conjunction with the exhibition Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler: Sound Speed Marker, on view through Sept. 5 at Blaffer Art Museum. The event is free and open to the public.

Koepnick received a Joint-Ph.D. in 1994 in German Studies and Humanities from Stanford University. After teaching for nearly twenty years at Washington University St. Louis, Koepnick joined Vanderbilt in June 2013.

Koepnick has published widely on film, media theory, visual culture, new media aesthetic, and intellectual history from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. He is the author of On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary (2014); Framing Attention: Windows on Modern German Culture (2007); The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood (2002); Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (1999); and of Nothungs Modernität: Wagners Ring und die Poesie der Politik im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (1994). Koepnick is the co-author of Windows | Interface (2007), [Grid ‹ › Matrix] (2006), and the co-editor of four anthologies on sound in modern German culture, the exile of German visual artists and filmmakers in the United States, the global connections of postwar German cinema, and the role of German aesthetic theories in an age of new media. His current projects include Notes on the Long Take: Toward a Wondrous Spectator, a book investigating the representation of time and duration in international art cinema and video art today.

Sound Speed Marker showcases a trilogy of video installations, related photographs and an outdoor sculpture by Hubbard / Birchler. Organized by Ballroom Marfa, where the exhibition premiered in 2014 before traveling to the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Sound Speed Marker addresses all the known clichés associated with Texas: its industries of cattle, oil and space, its heroes of cowboys, wildcatters and astronauts, its vast land and skies and extreme weather. But it removes them from their isolated existence of singular ideas and concepts and inflects them with real times, places and people who collectively deny their simple perpetuation. More broadly, the site, subject and mystique of Texas and its associated cinematic imagery serve as a platform for reflection on filmmaking itself. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalog including a contribution by Blaffer director and chief curator Claudia Schmuckli. Works appear courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin.